Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
2017
- women’s fiction
- contemporary romance
- mooning
- dry ice
- binge drinking
- suicide
- general practitioners
- mental health counsellors
- foster care
- congregate care
The story
No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
What it’s like
Wry, close-third prose with a deadpan narrator who reports everything with flat literal precision, so the humour arrives through understatement and the warmth creeps in slowly. The book's sensory world is kitchen-table ordinary: frozen pizza, vodka measured out on weeknights, the hum of a Glasgow office, the sterile waiting rooms of GP surgeries and counselling appointments. Its mood is quiet melancholy softening into hope, gentle and a little bittersweet, best for a rainy Sunday on the sofa or a late-night read when you want company without noise. The pacing is unhurried and conversational, chapters that move between small routines and sharp, unexpected moments of connection. Its emotional arc follows a woman who has walled herself off since a childhood trauma, slowly learning to let people in alongside two unlikely companions. Intensity is moderate: the backstory involves abuse, foster care and a suicide attempt, all handled with restraint and no graphic detail, with heavy drinking shown frankly. Violence is brief and not described in gore. It suits readers who enjoy character-led fiction with dark undertones and a redemptive, tender ending, especially those who like humour that comes from an unfiltered, socially awkward voice.
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